Making It Harder to "See" Meaning: The More You See Something, the More Its Conceptual Representation Is Susceptible to Visual Interference.

Does the perceptual system for looking at the world overlap with the conceptual system for thinking about it? We conducted two experiments ( = 403) to investigate this question. Experiment 1 showed that when people make simple semantic judgments on words, interference from a concurrent visual task scales in proportion to how much visual experience they have with the things the words refer to. Experiment 2 showed that when people make the same judgments on the very same words, interference from a concurrent manual task scales in proportion to how much manual (but critically, not visual) experience people have with those same things.